How to get PCL ?

There are two ways of getting PCL installed into your system. You can either use the provided
installers on this downloads page, or build PCL out of sources.

When should/can I use the provided installers ?

Only if you are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008, then you can use the installers on this downloads page. However, you may still want to build PCL from sources if :

you use a different compiler;

you plan to use PCL for a long term project;

you want to test some new features not yet available in the official releases...

How can I install PCL using the installer ?

We provide installers for both 32bit and 64bit architectures. You have to choose the right all-in-one installer depending on your setup.

Note:

You don't need to build anything to be able to use PCL. The all-in-one installers contain already prebuilt PCL libraries that are ready to be used in your own projects right after the installation.

To be able to use a Kinect-like device with PCL, you should install the PCL Sensor driver
available on the downloads page (already bundeled into the all-in-one installers). Other drivers (OpenNI, Avin2,...) are not guaranteed to work with PCL, so make sure to completely uninstall any one of them before installing PCL all-in-one installer.

If you're developing with a different compiler, and are willing to help us support additional platforms, please contact us. Thank you in advance.

Can I still debug my PCL based project and step into PCL code even if I use PCL all-in-one installer ?

Yes!

Download the PDB archive that corresponds to the used PCL all-in-one installer;

Unzip it inside the bin subfolder of your PCL installation folder, so that the pdb files lie near to the dlls;

Once the debugger needs to step into PCL code, you will be asked for PCL sources folder. You can download the sources archive from here. Unzip it somewhere on your disk, and give the debugger the path.

If you want to build PCL from sources using the prebuilt 3rd party libraries, do not use the all-in-one installers, but rather, prefer the 3rd party stand alone installers as they will set some environement varibales which will make configuring PCL much easier.